How can we reconcile social struggle and environmental
struggle? This question poses problems for trade unionists. To avoid a climate
catastrophe, it would be necessary to reduce economic activity, to suppress useless
or harmful production, to give up a substantial part of the means of transport
… But what would happen to employment then? How can we avoid a surge of
unemployment, a new rise of poverty and precariousness? In today’s relationship
of forces, in the face of financialized and globalized capitalism, these
challenges seem impossible to meet.
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has drawn
a radical conclusion: under the guise of fine words in favour of the “just
transition,” it has chosen to accompany the evolution toward an impossible
green capitalism. The Vancouver “Resolution on
combating climate change through sustainable development and just transition”
(2010) is clear: this document advocates a transition that “without endangering
industries’ competitiveness or putting excessive pressure on state budgets”
(Article 5).
We feel that we are dreaming: the demand for the respect of
competitiveness is not even accompanied by a reservation concerning the fossil
fuel sector, the main cause of climate change! However, without breaking the
power of this sector of capital, it is strictly impossible to avoid the climate
catastrophe.
A Just Transition?
The ITUC wants to believe that a “democratic governance”
integrating the “just transition” would open up “new opportunities,” that it
would create massively “green jobs,” good and “decent.” This is wishful
thinking. Capital invested in the “energy transition” in no way derogates from
the ruthless capitalist offensive against wages, working conditions and trade
unions. Germany is at the forefront of both renewable energy and expanding an
underclass of poor workers. In many countries, governments use ecology to
dismantle union strongholds in traditional sectors.
Developing a genuine trade union alternative to the class
collaboration policy of the ITUC leadership is of strategic importance. The
working class occupies a decisive position in industry and services. Without
its active participation, an anti-productivist transformation of the economy
will remain impossible. But how to win workers to the struggle for the defence
of the environment? That is the question. The answer is difficult. All the more
difficult because the balance of power is deteriorating and the poison of
division is spreading in the working class.
Self-Organization of
the Working Class
What must be done? To begin with, the problem must be posed
correctly on the theoretical level. For here we are touching on a fundamental
question: capital is not a thing, but a social relation of exploitation that
subjects workers more firmly than chains would. Like it or not, this system
compels every worker to produce more than is necessary for the satisfaction of
their needs, and to realize this production in the alienated form of the
commodity.
So, to collaborate in productivism, which ‘exhausts the only two
sources of all wealth: Nature and the worker’ (Marx). Today this collaboration
is becoming more and more unnatural, since it threatens the very survival of
humanity. But in “normal” conditions, capitalist competition imposes it on
everyone.
We must therefore get out of “normal” conditions, out of the
competition of everyone against everyone. How? By collective organization, by
the action of the exploited for their demands. “The emancipation of the working
classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (IWA 1864). This
famous phrase of is more than ever valid. Faced with the ecological crisis, the
enormous problem of the submission/ integration of workers to the productivist
race of capital can only be surpassed by self-organized struggle.
Practical
conclusion: any collective resistance against austerity, dismissals and
closures must be supported, even critically (when it is not really democratic,
or its starting point is antithetical to the defence of the environment).
Because one thing is certain: workers who are defeated in the immediate
economic fight against austerity will not progress to a higher political
consciousness, integrating the ecological question.
Workers’ control and democratic self-organization can work
miracles in terms of consciousness. Even at the level of an enterprise. A
remarkable example was provided in 1975-1985 by the “surplus workers” of the
glassworkers’ sector in Charleroi: following the fight against the closure of
their company, they imposed their conversion in a public enterprise of
insulation/renovation of housing (the enterprise was created but sabotaged later
by politicians and employers).
Form an Ecosocialist
Consciousness
Such examples, however, remain exceptional. In general, the
formation of an ecosocialist consciousness requires an approach and experiences
at a broader level than the enterprise. It is at the inter-sectoral level that
trade-unionism can best pose structural demands consistent with an
anti-capitalist approach to the transition.
To take some examples: the
extension of the public sector (free public transport, for example); the
expropriation of the fossil fuel sector (a condition sine qua non for a rapid
transition to renewables); the radical reduction of working time, without loss
of salary (a condition sine qua non for reconciling decreasing output and
employment).
But the programme and the struggle are not enough. An
ecological and combative trade-unionism requires us to look beyond the
inter-sectoral level. A strategy of convergence with other social movements –
peasant, youth, feminist, ecological – must be conceived.
This implies abandoning
the misconception that work is the source of all wealth. In truth, the
exploitation of wage labour presupposes the appropriation and exploitation of
the natural resources which necessarily provide the material object of labour
on the one hand, and on the other the patriarchal exploitation of care work,
carried out mainly by women and “invisible” in the context of the family. The
capital-labour contradiction is thus embedded in a broader antagonism between
capital, on the one hand, and reproduction on the other.
If it places itself at the heart of this antagonism,
trade-unionism can get out of being on the defensive, make alliances with other
social movements, develop with them an attractive ecosocialist project. It is
not a question of reviving the chimera of a progressive social transformation
by the accumulation of micro-experiences that are supposed to make it possible
to avoid a global trial of strength. On the contrary, it is a question of
preparing this trial of strength at the territorial level, by systematically
developing practices of control, solidarity, self-organization and
self-management.
These will encourage the exploited and oppressed to take
things into their own hands, to become aware of their strength, thus promoting
an overall ecosocialist and feminist awareness that will strengthen
trade-unionism.
This strategic proposal will seem to some people to be far
removed from the real relationship of forces. Let them not forget this: the
relative calm that reigns on the surface of social relations is misleading.
Capitalism is mutilating life and nature. Human nature in particular. The
majority of the population are forced to exhaust themselves and to exhaust the
environment in alienated work, more and more useless, ethically unbearable and
which produces a miserable existence. The explosive material accumulated in
this way can release its energy to the left or to the right.
And the climate strikes by young people over recent months
in an increasing number of countries are only one positive example of this
dynamic – which also is shown by movements like Black Lives Matter and the
Women’s strikes planned again for March 8 this year. The political discussions,
including on issues such as productivism and growth, taking place among young
climate activists need to be spread in trade union circles – as well as the
energy and militancy of their mobilization.
It is an understatement to say that trade-unionism has an
interest in the liberation on the left of the social energy accumulated in the
society by forty years of neoliberal policies. It is by linking the struggle
for social justice and environmental justice in an anti-capitalist and
anti-productivist perspective that it will have the greatest chance of
succeeding.
Daniel Tanuro is a certified agriculturalist and ecosocialist
environmentalist, writes for La gauche, (the monthly of the LCR-SAP, Belgian
section of the Fourth International). He is the author of Le moment Trump
(Demopolis, 2018).
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